


show me the foothold from which i can climb

by foibles_fables



Category: Horizon: Zero Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Belonging, Female Friendship, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, Missing Scene, Touch-Starved, listen - Aloy deserves the WORLD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-16 13:06:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28582461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foibles_fables/pseuds/foibles_fables
Summary: "You've never slept in a Nora lodge before. Not very private."In which Aloy learns that, truly, not all comforts are bad. A missing scene from Mother's Heart the night before the Proving.
Relationships: Aloy & Vala (Horizon: Zero Dawn)
Comments: 24
Kudos: 33





	show me the foothold from which i can climb

**Author's Note:**

> So! Here we stand: new year, new fandom, new female protagonist to love and _completely_ fixate on. I've discovered this game nearly four years too late and have played only 15% so far, but yeah. We're doing this. If anything late-game inaccurate makes an appearance here, I apologize! It's because I could not even entertain the thought of waiting to finish the game before writing. Gotta give Aloy _all the friends_ because _she deserves them_. On with it, then!
> 
> listen: ["Mountain at My Gates" - Foals](https://open.spotify.com/track/53L6A3I9vf7rgEZnMzx54E)

When Aloy imagines who her mother might have been, all she’s capable of conjuring up is a hazy phantom of her own face.

Half-formed and indistinct, interrupted, like catching a partial glimpse of her reflection in a rippling stream. Leaner in the jaw, maybe, or a bit darker in the eyes, less sun-freckled — the image changes in subtle ways with each iteration, but always dissolves back into the unavailing form of just herself. Over and over. And it frustrates. Not only in her failure to winnow even the flimsiest shred of memory, whether real or invented, but in the way she slips into the distracting action itself.

(Truth be told, more things cause frustration than not. It smolders somewhere shallow enough to feel but too deep to fully grasp, lashing at her limits in fits and starts. Gritting her teeth in grooved silence, she pushes her proficiency until her body is raw, mind quieted. Single-minded pursuit tempered, desperate determination galvanized.)

Imagining like this is not deliberate. Her mind never opens to these futile visions with true intention. Not for a very long time, at least, not since she learned that to do so was to _hurt_. And she’s a remarkably quick learner. The harsh lessons of the wilds (lessons from Rost, she corrects, pulse tightening before she wills it away) made sure of that. Every gash, scrape, black eye, the bruised ribs, the smashed fingers, never the same one thrice. Each one has forged her body as much as her mother’s body once did. Maybe more.

But wondering and questioning are different from imagining, in ways difficult to discern but simple to feel. Aloy _does_ wonder, and Aloy _does_ question.

She wonders often. Her mind drifts to the low-level buzz while she’s crafting arrows or running a familiar trail. The thoughts form the entity that drives her. How a babe in arms can carry the yoke of some heinous and shrouded disgrace, or how such a small rock can leave a lasting scar. If connection and belonging are birthrights or only spoils for those deemed worthy. Whether or not her mother held her close, whispered anything with meaning into her downy hair, before turning and abandoning her — the first action that climbed across time, leading to this very night.

This very night, Aloy has already been wondering how her mother fared in her own Proving. And if she had been at _this_ Proving’s ceremony hours before, watching in hidden restraint as Aloy, kneeling and straight-faced and resigned and shunned so very _humanely_ , released a lantern she had no part in crafting.

When these thoughts become uncontainable — growing barbs, teeming with venom — they turn into questions caught somewhere between beg and snarl. Once it was Rost who bore the brunt of them. Then, once, she saw grief rush through his gaze and realized that she could both be wounded and wound others alike.

Now she only asks these questions of things upon which she can’t shove added burden. Things that can’t look at her with that reserved guilt: the sparking carcass of a Watcher she just felled, a training dummy with her spear buried deep, the night sky far away from everything. The destroyed machine, the straw-and-hide, the aloof stars, they tell her nothing. Answers will only be granted if she succeeds here. No, only if she takes all, with fierce and decisive dominance. Precision isn’t enough, she reminds herself. Nearly nothing is.

But imagining is something that comes much closer, too close for comfort. More saturated. Crucial, ensnaring, rending vital parts. Cutting quickly and cleverly like a well-crafted spear, like weakening in winter, like slowly collapsing under the weight of her mind’s own construction. These unbidden ghosts, all of the aching missing fragments, only creep in when she feels spread thin and soft in the middle — when her attention and defenses are pulled in too many directions, leaving the weakest spots vulnerable.

Moments (and here a fellow aspirant turns heavily in their slumber, and Aloy feels the slow but grating _creak_ of the bunk’s wooden frame shoot through every notch of her backbone) just like this one.

Tomorrow is a reckoning of the past twelve years. It’s the reckoning of Aloy’s entire life,really. It’s the reckoning of her life and Aloy hasn’t been able to close her eyes for more than fifteen seconds, let alone actually fall asleep. The torches were allowed to burn out long ago. Hours have passed since she first sat stiff on her bunk (which she instantly noticed was the only singleton in the bedhouse) with her knees pulled up to her chest — aware too late that she was making herself look small in front of those who need no help thinking of her as such. She’s not small. She’s not small and she’s going to affirm that to them, claws out, chin raised...

But she’s tired. Sapped bone-dry.

She’s already striven a blistering amount harder for this as any of these other aspirants. All around her, they sleep soundly with the rest she’s earned but can’t take. One young Nora is snoring with particular vigor and, sucking her teeth, she decides she’s pretty sure it’s Bast. That wouldn’t be surprising. Doesn’t shut up even when he’s unconscious.

Her lack of sleep isn’t for lack of trying. She keeps closing her eyes and visualizing brave trails, strategizing ascents, keeping her mind occupied until she can hopefully doze off. But the handholds keep breaking off from the cliffside rock. The ropes fray to bits as soon as she clutches them. Her feet slip lamely along the suddenly-too-smooth rock, desperate for purchase to support her weight. So she opens her eyes, because staring at a dim, unfamiliar ceiling is marginally better than the feeling of free-fall.

She sends the fingertips of one hand skimming idly over her Focus. Not to activate it, but to pull some of its familiarity into the cold corners of her body. An old habit, found and cleaved to here in the unaccustomed dark. Bast snores again. Someone else coughs. More noises, too, of the unflattering variety which her sensitive ears don’t want to identify. Aloy cringes and slips Rost’s amulet into her other palm. Its corners are worn smooth. She suddenly feels ragged.

It’s so _loud_. Completely unbelievable how a group of people can make so much noise while doing absolutely nothing. The continued drumming in the distance is decidedly unhelpful, as is the lingering smell of roasted boar, remnant of the earlier feast. Aloy had sat alone on the far side of a fire, avoiding the scrutiny and scandal, and forced herself to eat. She knew she would need the energy despite the way her stomach protested. And now it’s objecting again, roiling and jumping into her throat every time she inhales its grease. She catches strong hints of ale, too, and tries to reason out what could have possessed any of these cocky idiots to celebrate _that_ heartily before the trials to come.

The aspirants are all so close together, so close to _her_ , crowding her, throwing both body heat and aloof coldness instead of rocks. Not very private? Not private at all. Her skin crawls and she bites back against the weakness inherent in the way she’s reacting. Not now. Can’t do this now. She’s almost there, at the end of it. She would reach her hands out, to see if she can touch it, all that surrounds her are the shadowed figures of a life she never knew. A life so many gathered here want to keep her from knowing.

Rost was right about Mother’s Heart, and his claims grow truer with each heartbeat (which are turning rapid and unruly). Right now, everything about it, everything about this lodge, overwhelms her senses: blurs the edges of her vision, echoes her hearing, makes her mouth taste like bitter ochrebloom. Keeps her from swallowing or catching her breath, like a bow strung too tightly, bending into the pull, rigid but still folding. Heat rolls over her and then evaporates in quick succession, leaving both coldness in her limbs and sweat dampening the hair at the nape of her neck. Rost is always right. Rost is _gone_. Her callused fingers, usually so agile, fumble on the amulet. Her heart fumbles too.

Rost is gone and she’s here, wide awake in this odd space where existing feels sore. Like she’s breaking out of her skin, left unprotected, all of the sure determination being broken off piece by piece. Caught here floating, frozen, sleepless and scrutinized, between cruel origin and breathless end. Between what she once was and what she could know, what she could be.

Right now, static on this daunting threshold, Aloy is nothing and nobody. She’s not a child outcast, not anymore. _Home_ shattered before her eyes when Rost turned his back and left her at this imposing boundary that kept them out. Another scar, another rip at her seams. She’s not a member of the Nora. Even if she wears all the right hides and furs and metal plating, her face bears not one streak of blue belonging. And she’s not a daughter. At least, not like her fellow aspirants. Still a life marked for condemnation by the absence of a mother triumphantly and lovingly shouting her brand new name to the Goddess at sunrise.

And, now, she’s been marked for condemnation by the lighting of a lantern made outside of tradition and given out of pity.

All of it stirs up the sensation of standing at the very edge of a cliff, as Aloy’s done countless times before, looking out over the Sacred Land. And looking in on Mother’s Heart from the outside, so far away. Except now, instead of seeing for miles and miles, everything around her is obscured by impenetrable fog that stares back at her in a reflection of her own likeness. She touches her Focus again with trembling fingers, willing her head to clear. It doesn’t. She thinks instead of tumbling into the eerie pit of earth and metal where she discovered it.

The fog surrounding her is the black-gloom darkness of the bedhouse. It’s the obscurity of her origin. And the precipice under her feet is too narrow for her body; the air sings its downward call, forcing her to keep flawless balance through the pounding pulse, and breathing that’s turning ragged. To let go of the path behind and reach for the path ahead with all of her weight. Aloy, unable to take in enough air, holds back a sob because she hasn’t heard her own sobbing in so long, and doesn’t know what a sob would sound like here. She can’t close her eyes, even though she can’t see a thing. If she can’t close her eyes, she can’t sleep, and tomorrow her head will be slow and her grip will be weak and her aim won’t be true. And she’ll fail. Twelve years and an entire purpose collapsing into dust, slipping out of her fingers with no answer—

A closer and more articulate noise breaks through the spiraling clamor, grabbing Aloy’s attention with the same impact as a decisive punch to the throat.

“Hey, outcast.”

In spite of the title used, Vala’s whisper carries no vein of hostility or malice. Still, Aloy has to keep herself from either wincing away or lashing out.

A split second’s bewildered pause. Then, suppressed and suspicious: “What?”

Vala turns over to face her, head propped on hand. “Look. I know I’m a top competitor, and I recognize what you’re doing. I don’t appreciate the attempt at sabotage. You’re hurting your own chance at winning tomorrow, too,” she remarks, careful of volume, backed by snore and groaning shift. The way Vala says it sounds more joking than incensed, but.

“What are you talking about, _sabotage_?”

This time, Aloy does wince, with a surge of regret for the way her response came with such bile at the only aspirant to show her even a hint of decency or welcome. Great. Impressions are going _very_ well. Her fist curls around Rost’s talisman and squeezes, tight. She meets Vala’s gaze in the darkness for a fleeting moment before quickly looking away.

“Trying to disrupt my sleep. Keeping me awake with all the thrashing?” Vala offers with a faint smirk, raising one eyebrow. “You’re tossing around like a Strider in its death throes. Not really a soothing lullaby.”

And Aloy, baffled, silenced, brought low, realizes. While her mind was lost for courage, her body had betrayed her. Usually so adept in stealth, now apparently earning her every bit of attention she doesn’t want. At least, she doesn’t want it _now_. Sitting up, Aloy draws her knees in again, knowing Vala can see the flinching withdrawal, but pretending for her own sake that she can’t.

“Sorry.” The murmured apology isn’t gruff. It’s reticent, but genuine. A little embarrassed, maybe. She's not sure what her own voice carries as her head’s still buzzing with electric static. “I guess I didn’t notice. I’m not trying to be noisy on purpose. It’s like you said. I’m…” A sharp sigh, and oh, yes, she guesses she _is_ being loud. “I’m not used to sleeping with so many people around.” A laughable understatement. The words feel thin, carried from the back of her throat with too much breath.

“Still too many comforts and distractions?” Vala asks-but-not-asks, repeating the comment Aloy made when she was feeling much more certain. Aloy turns her head, perplexed by how Vala’s irises glint deep amber against the gray dimness.

“Yeah, those.”

“Well, right now, you’re the one being a distraction.” Vala shrugs. “So I’ll ask. Are you alright, Aloy?” No justifications, no explanations, no qualifiers, no sneering judgement. Just a question. But questions are still difficult even when void of those things.

“I’m fine.” Aloy bristles, shoulders lifting and tensing of their own accord. “Just struggling to settle. I’ll be more mindful of my movements so I don’t sound like a dying machine. Thanks for that, by the way.”

Vala looks decidedly unconvinced, straight-mouthed, brow notched. “Are all outcasts terrible liars, or is that just you?”

And maybe it’s because her head is still full of slag, or maybe it’s because Aloy is actually as bad at shutting up as Bast. She finds that once she’s started talking to someone who’s actually listening, it’s incredibly hard to stop. It’s a rush of something new and terrifying and wanted despite everything.

“It’s a lot.” Her whispering is her own undoing, here. She recoils through them but they keep pouring out like a river stopped up for too long. “The sounds, the crowding, the proximity. It’s making my head spin Like everything is closing in, suffocating me. I can’t close my eyes.” Her voice breaks off, finally managing to stop before she says a single damning thing about her mother or the haunting fog. Instead, she takes a deep breath. “It makes it worse.”

“Vision blurry, heart fast, all dizzy and clouded like your head’s going to burst?”

“Something like that,” Aloy rasps.

“I think I can help with that. Here.” With an easy sigh, Vala shifts onto her back, keeping their gazes locked. She extends her arm into the space between their bunks. “Take my hand.”

And Aloy reels, mouth all but falling open, dumbstruck at the hand so plainly held out to one shunned. So plainly held out to _her_.

It’s no surprise that her first natural reaction is one of pure defense.

“Why?” she asks, tone edged, glancing between Vala’s hand and Vala’s face, unsure what to do with or make of her suddenly-vibrating body.

“It’ll ground you,” Vala explains with the slightest laugh that makes it sound like the most obvious answer, and that Aloy is both banished _and_ a clueless lard. “I used to get pretty terrible mountain sickness when I was a child. It was awful when my brother and I would go climbing on our own. My mother taught him to grab my hand when everything started whirling around...and I started turning green. It usually set me straight. Kept me from retching, at least. I think it will ease you too.”

A line is drawn and then crossed in rapid succession. A lifetime of messy resentment comes to a head and bursts. Aloy’s mouth gives just a tiny twitch as prickling heat creeps from her core to her neck to her cheeks. The law of the Nora has ripped everything from her grasp, over and over, rendering her worthless since before she could even comprehend the idea of being shut out. Why should she take any single thing offered now? Why should she lie there on full display and let them rummage for even more? They’ve given nothing. It would be absurd for that to change now. It’s absurd for Vala to want Aloy touching her. And despite the undeniable goodwill in Vala’s tone, Aloy can’t help but release sharp bitterness from a weary mouth.

“I don’t need your coddling,” she scoffs in a clipped hush, all spit and fire, meaning so much more than she actually says, “or your sympathy. I’ve made it this far on my own and pity is an insult.”

Except she’s never really been on her own. Not until tonight. Another piece breaks away, fleeing from the loneliness.

But Vala, for her part, just blinks once and patiently in the face of Aloy’s bruised seething. Her offered hand remains in place.

“This isn’t coddling or pity. This is strategy, outcast,” Vala replies, even-keeled as ever. “I’m planning to win tomorrow. If that means giving you my hand to quiet you down so we can both get some sleep, so be it. Besides — even though I’d still run you down if I’m half-dead from exhaustion — I would rather have a real battle with both of us at our best. Makes everything more interesting. A true Proving.”

The way Vala puts it is rational. Logical. And deep down Aloy recognizes that it makes sense. But sitting there on that Nora bed, where so many would claim she doesn’t belong, Aloy is none of those things.

“You know nothing about me.” Softer than before. Strained. The spite has drained from her voice (she’s _exhausted)_ but the dregs of stony and guarded reluctance persist. “I don’t expect you to do anything to help me.”

Aloy had expected to face confrontation here. She had expected spit at her feet, offended glaring, and the stark feeling of _other_. So far she’s mostly received what she expected.

“You’re right, I don’t know you. Not as much as I might have, if circumstances were different,” Vala agrees, nodding. Something about her hand’s closeness has Aloy hooked and trying not to stare, struggling to keep herself convinced of every single reason _why not_. “But I remember when you dropped that rock that day, all those years ago.” Vala pauses. In the space, Aloy pauses, too, remembering the sting and blood dropping down into her eyebrow, and how letting go of that stone was one of the most excruciating choices she’s forced herself to make yet. “It said enough about you then, and it still does now. And even when I win tomorrow—”

“So you’ve mentioned, once or twice.” But it doesn’t make Aloy boil inside like it did when Bast said it.

“Even when I _win_ tomorrow,” Vala pointedly ignores the remark, “you’ll still finish, because I have a feeling you don’t know how to give up, for anything. And then you’ll be a Brave. You’ll be one of us. You’ve got some lessons to learn about that. This is the first step. So, come on.” She nods toward her offered hand, open and waiting. “I’m not proposing marriage. Just trying to help when I can.”

And for a moment, Aloy continues to balk, hating how it feels like a mockery for so much kindness to flow around an idea from which she had spent her life in resentful exclusion. But that’s quickly eclipsed by her the way her body once again riots against her careful control. She looks at the outstretched hand and feels the impulsive, raw, tender pull in her chest, in her throat. It’s so close, beckoning to her, all of what she’s been denied displayed so plainly. Connection and belonging, front and center, through tangible touch. It sends her tense and helpless. She’s too exhausted to fight against the feeling of something inside of her, something that’s been buried for too long, breaking down in abject, wild desire for it.

And there’s confusion all throughout. There’s pain and want pitted against spiteful pride. But she reaches. Lies back down, slowly, so slowly, and reaches out for Vala’s hand, violating a sacred lawful border, stepping outside of what she’s known for eighteen years, daring cruel rejection, daring yet another moment of exile.

There’s no time to brace herself before their fingers brush together. Aloy’s breath hitches on the exhale. Her heart pounds and her blood rushes as that moment of release hangs over them. A weight flees her shoulders and it pulls a tiny, damning, helplessly feeble noise from her throat along with it — a soft gasp that makes Aloy cringe in vulnerability, makes her want to rip away and come apart.

But she doesn’t. Instead, she feels Vala’s hand close around hers — gently, respecting Aloy’s wariness, but firm enough for it to feel purposeful, and favorably given. The headrush swells in a final potent and riveting torrent.

Then, abrupt and profound quiet.

The convulsive commotion begins to evaporate at the point of contact. Aloy breathes. Once, and deep. Then again. Her heart slows. Ease settles around where their hands are halfway joined, and radiates out.

The world trembles where it never has before.

Aloy returns Vala’s grasp — for once, holding on to something that’s been imparted to her, and her alone, instead struggling futilely to cling to it as it’s stripped away.

(Most things were taken when she was too small to fight to keep them.)

In whatever part of her mind is not too stunned to fathom clear thought, Aloy grants that Vala was right. The mutual grip, bearing much more strength than it lets on, fastens. It secures her to this moment, to this place. And suddenly the jolts keeping her awake — the drumbeats, the close presence all around her, her own pulse in her wrists and temples — become less awful. Not by disappearing, but by consuming her and allowing her to consume. With the haze blown away, the dark becomes less sinister. It doesn’t hover as some all-consuming threat. It isn’t peace, either, but gives the impression of something that could one day twist itself into it.

And in that ethereal yet tenacious balance, Aloy is also fastened to herself. She is still not a child outcast, nor Nora, nor Brave, nor mothered. But she is also not nothing. Not nobody. She is a worthy and rightful aspirant, and she _is_ aspiring with gut and knuckle and grit. She’s not a wretched being drenched in blasphemy. Something glimmers on the other side of this critical threshold. Aloy sees herself finding and taking it — the Proving is named truly. She sees tomorrow’s misty dawn, not in fear, but in the gifts time and toil can bestow. The answer she’s always needed, and the path to testifying her significance in ways courageous and emphatic.

Without the need to look for it, she thinks of the mark of belonging over Vala’s right eye. And then she sees some version herself, too, painted in blue emblems, carved in potential, emerging from this liminal fog dripping with new tendency.

Rost’s final lesson hurtles back into her awareness. And she understands it again, differently — the idea of blazing forward in her own way, for some higher purpose. One she can believe in with nothing to doubt.

Vala’s grip on her hand might tighten. Aloy isn’t sure. But even a false phantom of it is enough. Suddenly feeling like a sieve for it, she wonders how she’ll ever make up for the amount she missed. There are countless heights to endeavor, and this is the base of just one. She’ll need to climb, beyond even tomorrow's Proving, until her fingers are raw and bloodied and her shoulders scream with monumental but worthwhile effort.

Somewhere the back of her mind, Aloy notes that Vala has been watching her with a muted, cautious smile.

“Any better?”

“I think so,” Aloy admits in a rasped sigh, still gazing upward. Then, a rushed addition: “Thank you.”

Vala’s smile feels a little brighter, then. Neither lets go. After a moment of counting along with her own heartbeat, Aloy chances the first step of this ascent.

“I’ve worked my entire life for this. For the pursuit of the boon. It’s going to be mine.” The simple truth hits the air with surprisingly steady candor, and its exposure aches less than Aloy expects. “I want to know why, and I’m going to ask.”

It takes steel to turn her head and meet Vala’s eyes. But once she musters it, she does so with stillness and steadiness. Vala regards her in silence, but with a look of grace that Aloy doesn’t understand. At first. But then, she remembers the way Vala all but rolled her eyes earlier — _you sound just like my mother_ — and realizes that certain influences extend to spaces beyond her own.

Vala carries something of her mother. So does Aloy, somehow, in ways she will discover. The pieces aren’t fated to always be missing.

“Then I’m more worried for tomorrow than I thought,” Vala says, roguish, with another smirking shrug. “That’s some powerful incentive to throttle us. So get some rest, outcast. I’m already looking forward to the chase.”

Aloy, silently agreeing on all counts, inhales, exhales, and releases Vala’s hand. The physical connection is severed, but the ripples of calm linger without losing force.

Exhausted eyes finally flutter closed.

Left there to herself, Aloy does not see some strange and infuriating projection of herself in place of her mother. No longer is she trapped on the crumbling ledge of a horizonless cliff, imploring her weight not to send her careening back down to the earth. Nor does she see lanterns burning bright against the night sky, carrying prayers to All-Mother on the wind, floating farther and farther away from her, cutting pathways into endless distance.

Instead, she drifts to a moment past. One in need of redemption, owed to her to be corrected. A place where she is so much younger, so much smaller, with her hands cupped and filled to brimming with berries — she had gathered as many as she could carry without dropping them. She looks up from her proud findings to see a face that time will never erase — one she’s seen in dreams again and again. The world becomes utterly still. Exhilarated and terrified, she presents her berries in offering, hoping, begging, reaching with quivering desperation, asking so many questions, asking the one question which matters most…

And, granted a small but genuine smile, Aloy receives her honest due.

**Author's Note:**

> ...and then we all know what happens, but. Just for a hot second. Let's pretend we don't?? _all together now_
> 
> Thanks so much for reading! I can't wait to learn more about this world, and to enjoy every second of the journey. Find me on Twitter or tumblr if you're interested in the stunned, inarticulate, and flabbergasted reactions I've had during my playthrough ~~though I don't know why any single person would want that~~.


End file.
